The Movie Review: 'Tarnation'

By Christopher Orr

"Am I on?" asks the figure on camera, who identifies
herself as "Laura Lou." "This is like a testimony, isn't it?" She wipes
her face nervously, explaining, "Jimmy says when I wear too much makeup
it makes me look like a whore." Her story is about the beatings she used
to take from her drunken husband; she tells it between sobs, tugging at
her bangs as if to hide behind them. At one point she breaks down
altogether. "I can't talk," she weeps. "This is really hard for me." But
she assembles herself again and goes back to her sad tale. "One night,"
she says, "he got out the gun. I was tied up on the bed. And he came
and pointed it to my head. And he said, 'I'll kill you, bitch. I'll kill
you.'" She pauses. "It was the other way around. I got out the gun one
night, blew his ass away."

It's not among the greatest performances ever committed to the
screen, but it is nonetheless a memorable one. This is because Laura Lou
is played convincingly by an eleven-year-old boy, Jonathan Caouette,
who also wrote the scene and filmed it on his Super 8 camera, without
any apparent adult supervision or assistance.

The clip is one of many eerie, fascinating home-movie snippets that
Caouette, now all of 31, plundered for his acclaimed 2004 film Tarnation, recently released on video. An autobiographical documentary (A.O. Scott dubbed it a moicumentary) initially put together on a home computer for a few hundred dollars, Tarnation
was a smash hit on the festival circuit and, for better or worse, has
been widely cited as a film likely to usher in a new era of intimate,
idiosyncratic, independent filmmaking.

The story told by Caouett is a bleak one. It begins with the 1950s
Texas childhood of his mother, Renee. A beauty as a young girl, Renee
was a sought-after child model and TV-commercial star. But at age twelve
she fell off a roof and for six months was paralyzed, though for no
apparent physiological reason. Believing her ailment to be
psychosomatic, her parents, Adolph and Rosemary, sent her for
electroshock therapy twice a week for two years. Caouette contends that,
far from treating a pre-existing ailment, the shock therapy pushed his
mother into a lifetime of mental illness.

Rene was briefly married, but her husband left her while she was
pregnant (he apparently didn't know), and she gave birth to Jonathan in
1973. A few years later, apparently in the grip of a psychotic episode,
she took Jonathan to Chicago, despite having no money and no place to
stay. There, she was raped in front of her son by a man who offered them
a lift. On the return trip to Texas, they were thrown off the bus as a
result of Renee's behavior. She was sent to jail; he was sent into
foster care where, he says, he was physically abused. Jonathan was
eventually adopted by his grandparents, while his mother bounced in and
out of psychiatric institutions.

At 13, Jonathan began sneaking into gay night clubs by posing as a
"petite Goth girl." Through friends he met there he discovered
underground film, and soon he was making his own B-style horror shorts with titles such as The Ankle Slasher and The Goddamn Whore.
(This latter starred his grandmother; a brief clip shows her
hilariously, if inappropriately, shouting obscenities into the phone.)
In his twenties, Jonathan moved to New York, where he found work as an
actor and happiness in a long-term relationship. Back in Texas, however,
his family continued to degenerate, culminating with a severe lithium
overdose by his mother, an episode which serves to both open and close
the film.

More striking than Caouette's tale, however, is the emphatic style
with which he tells it, a kind of music-video pastiche with echoes of
Andy Warhol, Gus Van Sant, and David Lynch. (It hardly comes as a
surprise that Van Sant is among Tarnation's executive producers; or that, in high school, Caouette staged a musical version of Lynch's Blue Velvet,
with the cast lip-synching Marianne Faithfull songs.) Old home movie
footage is stitched together with fragments of everything from Rosemary's Baby to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
The resulting montages are scored to songs as varied as Glenn
Campbell's "Wichita Lineman" and the bittersweet ditty "Frank Mills"
from "Hair." Saturated colors alternate with black and white, slow
motion with time lapse photography. Perhaps most crucially, Tarnation
features no narrative voiceover; instead it uses onscreen text to
explain the story behind its impressionistic blur of images, a choice
that gives the movie an unsettling affectlessness.

As a result, Tarnation seems
simultaneously heartfelt and ironic, intimate and remote. If a story of
such misfortune were told in this vein by anyone other than a direct
participant, it would seem callous and exploitative. But the film's
oddly detached tone seems reflective of Caouette himself, who claims to
have suffered from a "depersonalization disorder" as a result of
PCP-laced joints he smoked as a boy.

Tarnation is, in other words, an unusual and frequently
arresting film. But it is also a troubling one, to a degree and for
reasons not adequately discussed. The chief complaint critics leveled
against the movie involved Caouette's apparent narcissism. And it's true
that the director's handsome features take up more than their share of
screen time in a film that is ostensibly about his mother. But the
deeper problems with Tarnation concern its authenticity as a documentary.

Simply put, Caouette's reliability as a narrator is difficult if not
impossible to gauge. There are peculiar omissions from his youth. He
doesn't say, for example, when his family learned he was gay or how they
responded--let alone what it was like to be a gay teen openly dating in
1980s Texas. Though a younger half-brother makes a brief appearance in
the film, Caouette never explains his provenance: Did Renee remarry?
What happened to the father? Worse, Caouette neglects altogether to
mention the son he fathered at age 21, or the boy's mother, a woman with
whom Caouette had a sexual relationship for years.

But more disturbing are the relatively contemporary scenes at the
beginning and end of the film. By the time he shot these, Caouette
presumably had some inkling of the film he wanted to make, and much of
the footage seems obviously staged. The movie opens with glimpses of
Caouette's newfound domesticity: His boyfriend, David, walks into their
New York apartment; he finds Caouette sleeping on the sofa and wakes
him; the two get into bed. Because all three shots were meticulously
filmed with a stationary camera, it seems clear they were essentially
"performed," right down to the telling details: the staticky TV that
greets David's entrance, a groggy Caouette explaining that he'd been
dreaming about his mother.

The same is true, more creepily, of the scenes relating to Renee's
lithium overdose. Caouette films himself looking up "lithium overdose"
online, and crying in David's arms, and breaking down during a phone
conversation with the hospital, and vomiting in the toilet. How genuine
could any of these moments be? At best, Caouette was aware of the camera
as they unfolded; at worst, he fabricated them after the fact. (We
never hear a voice on the other end of the telephone, and while we see
Caouette cough over the toilet, we don't witness him actually throwing
up.)

The last scene of the film takes place after Caouette has gone to
Texas to rescue his mother, who suffered brain damage as a result of the
overdose, and bring her back to New York with him. She is sleeping
soundly on the sofa in Caouette's apartment (or at least she appears to
be), and he walks over and touches the crease between her nose and upper
lip. It recalls a bit of footage used earlier in the film, in which his
grandfather told him that's the spot where God touches babies before
they're born to take away their memories of heaven. Why did Caouette
stroke his mother there? Perhaps in part because he had a fond memory of
his grandfather's story. But more importantly, because he had that
memory on film and knew he could play off it to construct a heartwarming
conclusion.

These scenes are all crucial to the story Caouette wants to tell,
about how he escaped family disarray and dysfunction in Texas for
happiness and redemption in New York and how, in the end, he was able to
save his mother too. This story may be genuine--I certainly hope it
is--but it's impossible to tell, because so much of the footage Caouette
uses to convey it appears manufactured.

A final concern: Of the main characters in Tarnation apart
from Caouette, one is dead (his grandmother Rosemary), one is senile
(his grandfather Adolph), and one is delusional (Renee). It's hard to
imagine that any of the three could have given any meaningful consent to
their portrayals in the film, which are frequently pitiable. (By
contrast, boyfriend David is never shown in any but the most flattering
light.) There is footage of poor, wizened Adolph sitting in a house that
has been literally torn apart by Renee, alternating between oblivious
good cheer ("We've got a happy family ... a wonderful family") and
impotent rage (he tries to call the police to get Caouette to stop
filming him). There's an extended clip of brain-damaged Renee singing
and giggling like a child, enraptured by a small pumpkin. And worst,
there's a scene of Rosemary severely impaired after a major stroke.
Someone has put a dark wig on her head and Caouette encourages her to
perform for the camera: "Do your Betty Davis imitation, Grandma." "I
don't feel like it," she replies weakly.

It's one of several occasions in the film when Caouette's family
members ask him to please put down the camera. Perhaps the most poignant
takes place during Renee's first visit to New York, before the lithium
overdose. The onscreen narration has informed us that on this trip she
and her son "connected like never before." In his apartment, Caouette
tries to interview her about her experiences in the psychiatric
hospitals, but she retreats into another room. "You know, I'd like to
find out some things about myself, too," Caouette complains. "We can
talk, Jon," she replies. "We don't need it on film." Obviously, he
disagreed.

The Home Movies List:

Docudramatics

Capturing the Friedmans (2003). Like Tarnation,
the story of a family come undone, told in large part through old home
movie footage. In this case, however, it's told by an outsider, and thus
unfolds as journalism rather than artistic self-discovery. Though it
begins as an attempt to solve a crime that may or may not have taken
place, by the end this fascinating, sophisticated film has become an
exploration of the malleability of memory.

My Architect (2003). A terribly overpraised film about
legendary architect Louis I. Kahn directed by his semi-acknowledged
illegitimate son, Nathaniel. As a survey of Kahn's work, it's adequate
but unexceptional. When it comes to the oddness of Kahn's life (he had
two long-term mistresses he treated like subordinate wives) and his
death (anonymous and alone in the Penn Station men's room), Nathaniel is
too nice, too diffident to dig very deep. The resulting film feels
timid, as if the son still fears the dead father's wrath.

The Thin Blue Line (1988). The most straightforward of
Errol Morris's documentaries, and perhaps the best. Though it contains
the requisite flourishes (the stylized reenactments, the Phillip Glass
score), at its core it's a Kafkaesque story of the criminal justice
system's relentless effort to convict and execute an innocent man.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991). Perhaps the best of a lamentable genre, the "making of" movie (in this case of Apocalypse Now).
It has its flaws--chief among them a wooden voiceover by Eleanor
Coppola--but the details are mesmerizing, from Sheen's on-screen
breakdown to the cast's drug use to the Philippine Army helicopters to
Brando accidentally swallowing a bug. And, of course, there is Coppola
himself before his long fall, equal parts megalomania and self-doubt.
After watching The Aviator labor to portray Howard Hughes as a
filmmaker of reckless, demented genius, it may be worth taking another
look at the real thing.